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Net Marketers Worried as Cookies Lose Effectiveness
Saint Aardvark writes "The Globe and Mail reports that Internet
marketers are worried about the decreasing persistence of cookies.
Almost 40% of surfers delete them on a monthly basis, says
Jupiter Research -- a fact one marketers attributes to incorrect associations with spyware and privacy
invasion. United
Virtualities' Flash-based tracking system is mentioned as a possible
substitute...though they don't mention the Firefox plugin that removes
them, or talk in any meaningful way about why people
might want cookies gone. Still, the article is a good overview of
life from the marketer's perspective."
Going to play the devil's advocate here, because I know how most of the rest of you feel:
.com a few years ago. I created a custom metrics program that intergrated into into our (also custom) ecommerce application. To track users, I gave them a single, persistant cookie that contained only a GUID. I used this information to determine our converstion ratio (number of visitors to buyers), figure out the top paths through the site, determine percentage of traffic that was return visitors, etc.
I used to be the web architect for a
All this stuff was entirely anonymous unless they purchased something from us. But, even then their site history was really only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together. Why would I? Knowing that "John Smith" visited our site 3 times a week isn't really any more insightful that knowing that "User #5233258" visited us 3 times a week. The data was only useful in aggregate. For example, knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page. Maybe the contact form wasn't very user friendly? So, I'd tweak it and then recompare the metrics.
The whole point of my tracking was to better serve our visitors and eventual customers. I wanted to make it easier for them to do what they came to our site to do. Or it would help us target our advertising for effectively. If a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B, we'd decide to modify the banner ad to specifically highlight Widget B. Maybe my attitude is different than most, but I can't be unique. I never looked down upon our visitors, feeling that I was hearding cattle together to be slaughtered, or at least ripped off. Quite the opposite. These visitors wanted to be on my site, elsewise they wouldn't have dropped by. It felt pretty cool that so many people were coming to a site that I was responsible for managing. These people were supplying my paycheck and I had to make sure that they preffered our site to our competitors'. If a lot of visitors deleted that single cookie I used, that made that job much more difficult.
Does that still make me evil?
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I don't delete 'em. I log in to various sites that use them (that I want to use them), then I close the browser and then make the cookies.txt file read-only (chmod or chattr, or attrib). Get the benefit for sites I want the customizations on, don't get the tracking
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together ...
Does that still make me evil?
Yep.
If you have the *ability* to do it, then somebody in your organization eventually will decide that it sounds like a good idea.
This is why all my browsing is cookie-free (or rather, cookies being allowed on a whitelist basis and everything else removed on browser shutdown). I don't want you to have that ability to track what I do on your site for very long. Regardless of whether you use that ability or not, I don't trust you to behave properly with that information. Why should I? I don't know you.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Cookies were intended to allow sites to serve users by providing a convenient method of preserving client-side state.
They're intended to do legitimate things like let a site remember who you are so you don't need to log in every time you visit it, or assign a transaction code to make it easy for things like shopping carts to work... and prevent you from double-ordering if you click the "Order" button twice.
They were never intended for the purposes to which marketers have misappropriated them.
It's just another example of information being ostensibly collected for a purpose the user approves of, and then being secretly used for purposes the user is unaware of and might not approve of, and it justifiably makes people angry.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How many visitors are on an old dial up connection or connecting via proxy? I.P. numbers simply aren't a reliable way of providing usage statistics.
Every once in awhile I like to toy with the cookies. I'll edit their content - flip some bytes, add lots of corrupt text, delete sections. Occasionally, I'll flip all the cookies to "Read Only". Its fun to see a site occasionally puke from bogus cookie data.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
They abused phone calls, and that brought about the national Do Not Call list.
They abused TV commercials, and that brought about "commercial skip" VCRs and TiVo.
They abused pop-ups, and that brought about pop-up blockers.
They abused Flash to make more attention-getting (read: obnoxious) banner ads, and that brought about Flashblock.
They abused cookies, now people obsessively delete them if they allow them to be created at all.
Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
~Philly
I keep 3rd party cookies blocked... that keeps everything nice and clean.
For the layman, the way these tracking cookies work is when you're visiting site A, site A has a banner from site Z. If you have 3rd party cookies enabled, not only can site A set a cookie to your harddrive, so can site Z. Now, you go to site B which also uses site Z's ads... and site Z can see you were also at site A. Block 3rd party cookies however, and you cant get a cookie from site Z unless you actually VISIT site Z.
Disabling 3rd party cookies lets you keep their useful functions (login information at ebay, etc) and restrict the illegitimate ones (tracking my useage).
Mike Healan from Spywareinfo.com has a good article about cookies and their spyware-esque function here: http://www.spywareinfo.net/july20,2005#cookies
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer